


Empty-Hearted Town

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-14
Updated: 2012-03-14
Packaged: 2017-11-01 23:03:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/362247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p> <i>The only time I am lonely is when others are around. </i>Sherlock and Molly in the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empty-Hearted Town

A/N: Many thanks to my longest-suffering beta, [](http://tweedisgood.livejournal.com/profile)[ **tweedisgood**](http://tweedisgood.livejournal.com/)  Any mistakes remaining in here are mine, not hers. Lyrics of The Dawes’  _If I Wanted Someone_ are in here, here and there, also.  
  


 _Get to know me once I go away_  
  
When Sherlock walks back in, it’s in on Molly and John having a coffee in the lab as though they were expecting him, as though he wasn’t three years dead. And John does none of the four things Molly expects him to do.

He doesn’t punch Sherlock in the face, for one.  
  
He doesn’t throw his arms around Sherlock.  
  
He doesn’t faint dead away at the living corpse in front of him.  
  
And he doesn’t say a word.  
  
John Watson draws himself up tight as a bowstring, looks Sherlock straight in the face, and then turns and walks out. Slowly and unevenly, but calmly. He doesn’t even slam the door.  
  
Sherlock calls after him. Runs after him, actually, but John keeps walking and Sherlock’s extended hands go unmet.  
  
She can’t look at him when he shambles back in, a marionette with the strings cut. She’s missed him, though she knew a little where he was, got unsigned postcards from Burkina Faso and Gstaad. She’s missed him, but it hasn’t been the way John’s missed him, and she’s not a fool.  
  
For days thereafter Sherlock haunts the lab like the ghost he is, and after enough rattling about and upsetting her slides and rearranging her files without saying anything beyond grunted requests for crisps from the machine, she tracks down John at his new, post-Sherlock flat and barges in.  
  
“You knew,” he accuses, and she nods.  
  
“I’d say I’m sorry, but you wouldn’t believe me,” she tells him.  
  
“Did he,” John clears his throat. “Did he threaten you, coerce you in some way?”  
  
“Of course not!” She’s stung by it. “He asked for my help. He said this was the only way, and I believed him. Still do, actually.”  
  
“You don’t,” he says, and stops, in that telegraph-line way he has of talking since Sherlock left, as though full sentences are too much to transmit over the wires. “You don’t know what I. You don’t.”  
  
“Neither do you,” she says. She sits down uninvited on the posh and ugly green sofa, and tells him everything.  
  
  
 _If I wanted someone to clean me up, I’d find myself a maid_  
  
Molly drives the getaway car.  
  
That’s how she thinks of it, those few minutes. Like they’re Bonnie and Clyde, like they’ve just robbed a bank, stuck up a liquor store. That’s how she gets them to the warehouse without running a single red light or taking a single turn even one mph too fast. She thinks of it like a film, and she’s got to win best actress. That’s how she keeps him alive.

  
The door slams behind them and it’s dim and dusty inside, and somewhere a leak in the roof is dripping. She jams on the handbrake, jumps out, and he’s already sitting up. He’s covered in dirt from the bin bags and there are tears running down his face, and he’s trying to brush them away like they don’t matter but his hands are shaking too hard.  
  
When he asked her to do this, this mad thing, he looked much the same, but it was all in his eyes. Now it’s all over his face, and he looks at her once and is undone.    
  
He fell, open-armed, into the air, and she caught him. And John’s shout echoed in her ears.  
  
“I love you,” is what she says when she pulls him down and into her arms, sagging as the weight of him drives them both to the ground. Love isn’t what she means and he knows it, but he lets her hang on to his coat and hold his head against her breasts as the adrenaline rushes out of him and he comes apart, absolutely apart, in her arms. “I love you. He’ll know. He’ll have seen.”  
  
He might say something in response, but she can’t hear anything but the pounding of her heart. And his.  
  
  
 _If I wanted someone to spend my money, I wouldn’t need to get paid_  
  
She has to leave him, after an hour, to perform the autopsy and post the results. She unlocks the warehouse door on her return with her heart in her throat, expecting to find him gone. He’s sitting in the front seat of the truck, fingers steepled beneath his chin, looking like nothing happened to him, but for the dust on his clothes.  
  
She’s about to say, to tell him, but one sharp look and she holds her tongue.  
  
“I’ll leave tomorrow,” he says, forestalling her commentary. “I can stay here tonight. Go home, Molly. They’ll think it suspicious if you disappear.”  
  
She forces a laugh out, at that. Like hell they will. Everyone assumes she’s gone somewhere to get drunk or cry or both; silly girl with a silly crush on an even sillier man who fooled everyone around him but especially her.  
  
“I’m not at your level,” she says softly, “but I know what people think of me. If they think of me at all. Nobody will notice.”  
  
And he gives her the same look he gave her in the lab, a look as if she’d slapped him, as if he was offended by her knowledge of herself. “I shouldn’t have done this to you,” he says then, with more feeling than she’d ever heard from him. “You should have stayed out of it.”    
  
“You didn’t do this to me,” she says, and he flinches from the absolution as if if burns.  
  
“Give me that at least,” she snaps, her own anger tightening her throat.  
  
He wouldn’t give it to anyone else. John ― slumped against the glass in the morgue, as if someone had cut his strings ― and Greg ― his face gray, an Internal Affairs investigator dogging his heels ― would have suffered torments unto hell, she thought. But he walked forward from here alone.  
  
The sun is setting, a ray of light through a chink in the corrugated iron walls creeping across the floor. “I’ll leave tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll stay here tonight. Thank you, Molly.”  
  
It’s her cue to leave. She climbs up into the truck and settles herself beside him on the seat instead, going nowhere. He’ll spend the next innumerable nights on his own, in God knows what circumstances. She thinks for a moment, madly, about going with him, signing on to whatever cruise ship sailing/zeppelin ride/continental trainwreck his life is about to become. She thinks, for a moment, about burning her life down, the way he’s just set his alight.  
  
There’s hardly enough there to kindle. Her neighbor will look after the cat.  
  
He doesn’t speak when she turns sideways, rests her head on his shoulder, and closes her eyes.  
  
  
 _If I wanted someone to understand me I’d have so much more to say_  
  
It’s not his nightmare that wakes her. It’s hers. He pulls her back from the door she’s pounding on, begging to be let out of the morgue. She was trapped there with the bodies, locked in, freezing. She’s shivering when he pulls her back from the darkness, and it takes a moment of him holding her, very tightly, to warm.  
  
He should be the one having night terrors. He’s the one who went over a building.  
  
“He threatened John,” Sherlock says, words sandpapered down to nothing. “Mrs. Hudson. Lestrade. Said he’d hired snipers. Said they’d die if I didn’t jump. I knew it was coming. I felt it, does that make sense?”  
  
That’s why he asked her. Why he made plans. The wires, the autopsy, the telephone calls. She sees it, suddenly, as though she’d been standing on the roof with them, instead of waiting below. He heard Moriarty a mile off, a rail humming before the light of the train down the line. He heard Moriarty coming, and he roped himself to the tracks.  
  
“You aren’t telling John,” she whispers, struggling out of his arms. “You aren’t telling Greg or Mrs. Hudson --”  _that sweet old woman, that somehow seems the worst of it_ “\-- Sherlock, you saw them, you aren’t … you can’t ask me to …”  
  
He gives her the look he gives everyone when they’re being particularly obvious, that “didn’t you hear what I said?” look that makes her feel like something on the bottom of his shoe. They’ll die, he’s saying, and his hands come to rest on her shoulders. Don’t you see, they’ll die.  
  
She’ll later think of it as the worst thing she’s ever done. She’ll be unable to believe she did it. It will color everything she thinks she knows about herself, and it will make her life for the next three years an object lesson in just how many skeins one falsehood can unravel.  
  
There will be nothing left of her when this is done. She’ll be a tangle of ragged threads. Until the day she dies, she will not be able to forgive herself for it. Or him.  
  
She presses her lips to his, not in affection or passion but in assent, because that’s how a blood debt should be promised. That’s how a half a dozen lives should be ruined: With a kiss in the dark in a petrol-stinking wreck of a dustbin lorry, hungry and exhausted and sick with grief, as the sun comes up on all their hopeless tomorrows. 

  
His eyes are dry, his face is cold, and his voice is level when he tells her to take him to the docks.  
  
  
 _We need words to be put to what we do not understand_  
  
John’s quiet when she finishes her story, but not quiet in the way he’s been these three years since. Not quiet like someone’s stolen away his voice. Quiet like he has learned something important, and what he says ruins everything all over again.  
  
“Thank you," he finally says.  
  
“Thank you for keeping him safe. And keeping me safe. Mrs. Hudson. Lestrade. Thank you for helping him when I couldn’t.”  
  
She didn’t cry when Sherlock fell or when he left or when he came back, but she cries now, great gulping sobs and she bends forward and leans her forehead against her knees and she’s still trying to remember how to breathe when she hears the rustle of John rising from his chair.  
  
“I have to see him,” John says unsteadily, and she rubs her hands over her eyes and offers to drive.  
  
She sits outside the Baker Street flat long enough to hear the upstairs door slam with a force that probably dislodged a hinge, and a shout that traveled through the open upstairs window and could have been rage, or joy. Something dropped, something smashed, and briefly Sherlock’s white face appeared at the window, looking out at her.  
  
It was gone by the time she drove away.  
  
  
 _While you lean into the echoes and you do not raise a hand_  
  
John isn’t the only one owed an apology. There are so many people, so many it makes Molly’s head spin, but it’s Greg she goes to. Greg, who’s living in this little bedsit in a noisy neighborhood, working nights as security guard. His uniform is polyester and it’s given him a rash around his neck and she has to stop herself, clench her fists and stop herself from noticing everything now.  
  
That had started, while Sherlock was dead. The noticing.  
  
Greg always slipped into a room like smoke, seeping into the corners where he wouldn’t be noticed, where he could watch what happened. He never showed off. He got up for work every day and he never showed off. When she tells him the same story she told John, he isn’t even angry at her.  
  
He’s thinner and grayer than she has ever seen, his career is over, and she could have stopped it. She spent months lying for Sherlock, and sometimes her anger at him (and herself) still takes her breath away.  
  
“He was just always so …” She doesn’t have the words. Months with him in her head, and she doesn’t have the words. Not to defend him to one more man he’s ruined.  
  
Sherlock wept for John, and she could tell John that. If he wept for Greg, she never heard him.  
  
“I don’t know why it’s always all right, whatever he does,” she says, helplessly. “Even with him, it’s not all right.”  
  
“But it’s not about him,” Greg replies, voice sandpapered down to nothing now. “It’s not about what he deserves to get from you. It’s about what you deserve to give.”  
  
She could kiss him now, and he’d let her. She saw the way he once looked at her, when he thought she and Sherlock weren’t looking back. At Christmas, when she took off her coat, he drank in the sight of her body like burgundy wine.  
  
She wants to kiss him, actually. It would be little enough of an apology.  
  
It would be just one more lie she’d be telling him. She’s already made her plans. She’s leaving in the morning.  
  
It wouldn’t be fair.  
  
  
 _I want you to make the days move easy_  
  
Molly drives the getaway car.  
  
The film’s low-budget, but it’s good and she hasn’t worked in a while. The director is talented. It’s a small part, but she looks at the young woman behind the camera and thinks, “Someday I will tell people I worked with you and you’ll be so famous by then, they won’t believe me.”  
  
Her hair is dyed golden blond now, though in direct sunlight you can still see the strawberry underneath. Her skin is tan and still taut; she runs every morning on the beach, the waves pounding the surf drowning out her breaths.  
  
When she first got here she sat by the ocean every day. She closed her eyes and listened, let the sound drum deep in her chest until it was all she heard, all she felt, deeper than even her own heart pounding. Deeper even than his. She listens to the waves until she can hear them coming.  
  
She spends all day driving this beautiful vintage Mercedes, silver with red leather seats, back and forth down two blocks of streets closed off at great cost to the production, until finally the director yells, “Beer o’clock, cut!” and the crew applauds. Fifteen hours of filming, rent for a month on the tiny condo she moved into five years ago, carrying one suitcase full of airport t-shirts and a battered blue coat.  
  
She could have afforded somewhere larger. She could have afforded half the shoreline, with what Mycroft gave her, but she buys this little place and a futon, and then donates the rest of the money to the first animal shelter she picks out of the phone book.  
  
She likes California. She’s never cold here. She likes her neighborhood and her neighbors. She walks in the warm night and never feels afraid. She even likes her job. Every day is a blank slate, and she fills it with whatever she wants.  
  
She’s sipping a glass of wine at the fern-lined bar around the corner when he slides onto the bar stool next to her.  
  
“I heard you were here,” she says, and the lines around Greg Lestrade’s eyes spread when he smiles.  
  
She’d had an e-mail from John a few weeks after she moved, actually. Lestrade was in New York, consulting with a security firm. Sherlock’s revelations had restored his reputation but he’d rejected every offer to return to Scotland Yard, had gone private, corporate. How lovely, she replied. Then, a few months after that, Lestrade was in St. Louis, working with their interim police chief. Good for him, she wrote back. Then, an e-mail she didn’t respond to at all, that said, Lestrade’s in LA, shall I send him your way?  
  
He looks older, and probably is, older the way they all are, riven through with the lines that bind them back to what happened in what she only refers to, and only briefly, as then. Older only in his eyes; it’s amazing what you can go through, and have no marks on your skin to prove it.  
  
“I tracked you down,” he says, and there’s nothing but warmth in his expression. “I hope you don’t mind.”  
  
“I’m glad,” she says, and means it. He sits beside her, close enough for her to feel the warmth of his skin, and they start to talk. 

A. 

  



End file.
